Edmund Fawcett | |
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| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Notable work | Liberalism: The Life of an IdeaConservatism: The Fight for a Tradition |
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Edmund Fawcett is a British political journalist and author.
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Fawcett is the son of the human rights lawyer and international law professor James Fawcett, brother of the artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl, and maternal uncle of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, journalist Rachel Johnson, and politician Jo Johnson.
He is married to Natalia Jiménez, granddaughter of Alberto Jiménez Fraud , the Spanish liberal and founding director of the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, who left Spain as a political refugee in 1936.
He worked in London as an editor at New Left Books (now Verso) and in San Francisco as a free-lance editor for Straightarrow Press, the books arm of Rolling Stone .
He then worked at The Economist (1973–2003) as chief correspondent in Washington, Paris, Berlin and Brussels, as well as European and literary editor. In a long career covering international politics, he wrote about the growth of the European Union, democratisation in Spain, Portugal and Greece, the end of the Cold War, new hopes for the United Nations, Germany's unification and the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. In the United States, he travelled widely, followed three presidential campaigns and wrote about the decline of detente in the late 1970s together with the rise of Reaganism. His frequent book reviews have appeared in The New York Times , Guardian and New Statesman , Times Literary Supplement and Political Quarterly .
Fawcett's book, The American Condition, written with a fellow journalist, Tony Thomas, came out in 1981. It was published in Britain as America, Americans. Fawcett also writes for Aeon , [1] openDemocracy, [2] Salon , [3] and other websites.
His book Liberalism: The Life of an Idea was published in 2014, with an updated, expanded second edition in 2018. [4] Fawcett argues that liberalism is a "modern practice of politics" with a specific history, rather than a fixed and unchanging philosophy. [5] He has described himself as a 'left-liberal or liberal leftist'. [5] A companion volume, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition was published in 2020, also by Princeton University Press. It offers a fresh and sharp-eyed history of political conservatism from its nineteenth-century origins as opponent of liberalism and democracy to today's hard Right. [6]
The historian Peter Clarke in the Financial Times called Liberalism (2nd edition) "a liberal history, well-founded in its scholarship and also accessibly expounded". [7] The Guardian praised Liberalism as a "remarkable book", and "a helpful characterisation of liberalism". [8] The Wall Street Journal called the book a "fine work of intellectual history". [9] Jack MacLeod, writing in the journal Victorian Studies , said the book "makes a major contribution to our understanding of a concept that, for two centuries, has been central to Western political and cultural thought". [10]
Of Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition, Nick Pearce in the Financial Times said, "The chief virtue of Fawcett’s rich and wide-ranging account is to demonstrate how conservatism has repeatedly managed to renew itself, politically and intellectually. The conservative tradition is a remarkably fecund one. For both its supporters and opponents, that is a truth worth rescuing." The Wall Street Journal wrote: "With an even hand and historically informed eye, [Fawcett] faces our divided political scene as it is while going back directly to the figures—the classical liberal thinkers of the past and the lapidary upholders of tradition—who helped erect the two poles. The result is that increasingly rare thing: intellectual history in the service of understanding, not ax-grinding." John Prideaux in The Economist called the book "an epic history of conservatism."
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, depending on the particular nation, conservatives seek to promote a range of social institutions such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, property rights, and monarchy. Conservatives tend to favor institutions and practices that guarantee stability and evolved gradually. Adherents of conservatism often oppose certain aspects of modernity and seek a return to traditional values, though different groups of conservatives may choose different traditional values to preserve.
Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; civil liberties under the rule of law with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech. It gained full flowering in the early 18th century, building on ideas stemming at least as far back as the 13th century within the Iberian, Anglo-Saxon, and central European contexts and was foundational to the American Revolution and "American Project" more broadly.
Irving Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the [twentieth] century".
Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century.
Liberal conservatism is a political ideology combining conservative policies with liberal stances, especially on economic issues but also on social and ethical matters, representing a brand of political conservatism strongly influenced by liberalism.
Maurice John Cowling was a British historian. A fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, for most of his career, Cowling was a leading conservative exponent of the 'high politics' approach to political history.
Centre-right politics lean to the right of the political spectrum, but are closer to the centre. Parties of the centre-right generally support liberal democracy, capitalism, the market economy, private property rights, and a modest welfare state. They support conservatism and economic liberalism and oppose socialism and communism.
In the United States, conservatism is based on a belief in limited government, individualism, traditionalism, republicanism, and limited federal governmental power in relation to U.S. states. Conservative and Christian media organizations, along with American conservative figures, are influential, and American conservatism is one of the majority political ideologies within the Republican Party.
Conservative liberalism or right-liberalism is a variant of liberalism, combining liberal values and policies with conservative stances, or simply representing the right-wing of the liberal movement. In the case of modern "conservative liberalism", scholars sometimes see it as a more positive and less radical variant of classical liberalism, but it is also referred to as an individual tradition that distinguishes it from classical liberalism and social liberalism. Conservative liberal parties tend to combine economically liberal policies with more traditional stances and personal beliefs on social and ethical issues. Ordoliberalism is a influential component of conservative-liberal thought, particularly in its German, British, French, Italian and American manifestations.
In the United States, libertarianism is a political philosophy promoting individual liberty. According to common meanings of conservatism and liberalism in the United States, libertarianism has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom, often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism. Broadly, there are four principal traditions within libertarianism, namely the libertarianism that developed in the mid-20th century out of the revival tradition of classical liberalism in the United States after liberalism associated with the New Deal; the libertarianism developed in the 1950s by anarcho-capitalist author Murray Rothbard, who based it on the anti-New Deal Old Right and 19th-century libertarianism and American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner while rejecting the labor theory of value in favor of Austrian School economics and the subjective theory of value; the libertarianism developed in the 1970s by Robert Nozick and founded in American and European classical liberal traditions; and the libertarianism associated with the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971, including politicians such as David Nolan and Ron Paul.
In United States politics, modern liberalism is a form of social liberalism. It combines ideas of civil liberty and equality with support for social justice and a well-regulated mixed economy. Modern liberalism opposes the interests of corporations, opposes cuts to the social safety net, and supports a role for government in reducing inequality, increasing diversity, providing access to education, ensuring access to private sector healthcare, regulating economic activity, and protecting the natural environment. This form of liberalism took shape in the 20th century as the voting franchise and other civil rights were extended to a larger class of citizens, most notably among African Americans and women. Major examples of modern liberal policy programs include the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, and the Affordable Care Act.
Corey Robin is an American political theorist, journalist and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written books on the role of fear in political life, tracing its presence from Aristotle through the war on terror, and on the nature of conservatism in the modern world, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Most recently, he is the author of a study of Justice Clarence Thomas that argues that the mainspring of Thomas's jurisprudence is a combination of black nationalism and black conservatism.
Traditionalist conservatism, often known as classical conservatism, is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of transcendent moral principles, manifested through certain natural laws to which society should adhere prudently. Traditionalist conservatism is based on Edmund Burke's political views. Traditionalists value social ties and the preservation of ancestral institutions above excessive individualism.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles. However, they generally support private property, market economies, individual rights, liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.
Conservatism in the United Kingdom is related to its counterparts in other Western nations, but has a distinct tradition and has encompassed a wide range of theories over the decades of conservatism. The Conservative Party, which forms the mainstream centre-right party in Britain, has developed many different internal factions and ideologies.
This timeline of modern American conservatism lists important events, developments and occurrences which have significantly affected conservatism in the United States. With the decline of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party after 1960, the movement is most closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP). Economic conservatives favor less government regulation, lower taxes and weaker labor unions while social conservatives focus on moral issues and neoconservatives focus on democracy worldwide. Conservatives generally distrust the United Nations and Europe and apart from the libertarian wing favor a strong military and give enthusiastic support to Israel.
Progressive conservatism is a political ideology which combines conservative and progressive policies. The initial origins of progressivism come from Western Europe during the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment when it was believed that social reform and progression in areas such as science, economics, education, technology and medicine were necessary to improve human living conditions.
Traditionalist conservatism in the United States is a political, social philosophy and variant of conservatism based on the philosophy and writings of Aristotle and Edmund Burke.
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition is a 2017 book by English philosopher Roger Scruton, in which the author outlines the development of modern conservatism. It is intended as an introduction to conservatism, with the author stating, "I have written this book in the hope of encouraging well-meaning liberals to take a look at what [the] arguments [for conservatism] really are”.
Liberalism has been a notable ideology in Poland for hundreds of years. Polish liberalism emphasizes the preservation of democracy and opposition to authoritarianism. Liberalism was first developed in Poland as a response to the Polish–Lithuanian monarchy, and it continued to develop in response to the partition of Poland through the 19th century and Communist rule in the 20th century. Poland has officially been a liberal democracy since 1989, though its status has challenged as a result of illiberal reforms in the 2010s and 2020s.
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